Sparc began it's work in the
inner city of bombay,working with the pavement dwellers
- the most vulnerable and invisible of the urban poor.

The Pavement Dwellers
of Bombay

Pavement dwellings are
seemingly makeshift structures which exist mainly on sidewalks
or pavements of the city.

"We aren`t
living on the pavement because we want to. Good lord!
We want to live in pucca homes of our own like all of
you! But you`re not prepared to pay the cost in terms
of higher wages and less servants."

Pavement dwelling is probably as old as cities
themselves. Every city has its share of the homeless
and Bombay has more than most. In fact an English women,
who lived in Bombay in the 1920s, wrote of her shock and
distress at the numbers of people for whom the pavement
was their only home. The only real change since then has
been in the magnitude of the problem and in the
nature of official reactions to it.

Pavement
'slums' are a phenomenon peculiar to the largest Indian
metropolises (especially Calcutta and Bombay).
They are different from what are generally understood
to be 'slums'. They are not the juggi-jhopadis
or bastis which spring up on vacant lots or
stretches of land, but huts or shacks actually built on
the footpaths/pavements of city streets, utilising the walls
or fences which separate building compounds from the pavement
and street outside.

Most of the
adults living in pavement dwellings are employed; .these
people are mainly self-supporting with almost half being
gainfully employed virtually none are beggars. Far
from being a burden to the city's economy, they
are supplying it with a vast pool of cheap labour
for the unpleasant jobs which organised labour does not like
to do. They clean the
homes of wealthier groups, work on garbage dumps, move
goods from one place to the other and bring a
varied selection of daily consumption items to street
corners and people's doorsteps at a low price. They can
do this with such low incomes and survive only because
they are living on pavements, and initially did not incur
costs on either shelter or transport. Unlike
any other segment of Bombay's working population, they do
not use the city's already overloaded transport
system.

Pavement
dwellers generally begin living in these dwellings as ..It
needs to be stressed that people invariably take to
pavement a temporary measure, until they can
locate and afford better housing.Unfortunately,
most are never able to acquire better housing and
they end up living all their lives on the pavement.
In over half the pavement clusters in 'E' Ward (around 1500
households) where SPARC has been working, almost all the
families have been living on the pavement ever since their
arrival in Bombay - which for some is as long as 30 years
ago.

To hear a
pavement dweller talking about their past is to hear a
history of hunger and impoverishment.Over
three quarters of the pavement dweller households that took
part in a census owned no assets in their place of
origin. Most were agricultural labourers, before
moving to Bombay.

An Area Resource Centre
is a space defined by the community. It may or may not begin with
a physical space but it
begins to be created out of the psychological space that the
community creates for itself. In doing so it redefines its internal
arrangements and they learn a new way of talking to the outside
world. It begins by the community deciding that they need to commit
themselves to working together on the issues that are important
to them. These usually include issues concerning shelter and
infrastructure. -Sparcindia.org

And We Call
Ourselves Mahila MilanIt's been a very
Long March since then, one of little victories, many defeats, but
always a clear sense of the ultimate prize. The result: an extraordinary
self-confidence, tempered with realism about how the world really
works. They know that they have support if they need it. But
they also know they have rights to sit down with officials.
Just because they're poor doesn't take away any of those rights.[C.ELDOC.6008893]

The National Slum
Dwellers Federation (NSDF) was founded in 1974, and by 2003 had a
membership of 500,000 householdsspread around more than 50 towns
and cities in India.It aimsto help slum dwellers obtain
secure tenure so that they are notconstantly threatened with eviction,
and to assist them to develop basic infrastructure like access
to water and sanitation.

To make it
easier to negotiate for land in Mumbai, households organise into
smaller networks as part of the larger Federation.So
for example, families living alongside the railway tracks in
Mumbai have formed the Railway Slum Dwellers’ Federation, because
they will mainly have to negotiate with the railway authorities.Likewise
slum dwellers living on land owned by the national
Airports Authority

have formed the Airports Slum Dwellers
Federation, whilst pavement dwellers have linked
together
to form a Pavement Dwellers network. Slum
Dwellers living in other cities or states have
for example created the Karnataka and Orissa Slum Dwellers’
Federations,because they mainly have to negotiate with city/state government
for land, shelter and access to infrastructure.-
Homeless-International

it is a commonplace
phenomenon of our times that vast millions of Asia's peopleeke out the days and years of
their lives in city slums. In these
makeshift neighborhoods, life goes on without the most
basic services and with the constant threat
of eviction. In Mumbai (Bombay), India, alone, some six
million people live in such communities.Jockin
Arputhamknows
this world intimately, for it is his world. As founder
and leader of India' s National Slum Dwellers Federation,
Arputham has made it his lifelong endeavor to change this
world for the better. [C.ELDOC.dw_be.jockin]

Civil and political rights of slum dwellers: By Rajindar
Sachar
A false impression has been created that pavement dwellers
are unsocial elements; that a majority of them are criminals
and unemployed. This is sheer slander[C.ELDOC.1072000]

Mumbai to Slumbaithe
potential to convert the commercial capital of India into
a virtual slum...[C.ELDOC.6003276]

What
we can do with a slum? By Laurie BakerSlum-dwellers should not be evicted and
be forced to put up slums elsewhere. In their own way, they provide
a valuable service by cleaning away waste and recycling some of
the material. A slum must not just be patched up and it must not
be pushed to another waste place to become another slumThe recycled
slum should also have its own shops and market, a health centre,
a creche and a school, a library or a reading room, and a hall
for community use and for letting out for weddings and other
functions. It must have water, light and sanitation[C.ELDOC.1071996]

Interview
: Arputham JockinYou have been saying that
the government, politicians and officials are not receptive
to people and their representations, in the states other
than Maharashtra – especially Mumbai. Why is it so? See, we have been fighting on
the streets for our rights and demands. But we felt we
need to change that and get information on where and what
kind of land is available. And then, we started talking
to various officials since last ten years and slowly we succeeded
in convincing them what we are saying.[C.ELDOC.6009243]